Steven Spielberg’s 2002 Minority Report narrates two interrelated stories. The micro
story concerns a family, a kidnapped son, the ensuing trauma, and the work of mourning that
follows. The macro story concerns criminal justice, social stability, and hermeneutics at the level
of the nation state. The problem for both stories is ontological and hermeneutic play—some play
too much, some play too little. Sometimes play hurts, and sometimes the absence of play hurts.
Anderton (Tom Cruise), following the disappearance of his son, has lost the ability to play and
his obsession with criminal detection is an obvious response to private trauma. His public job as
a police officer, much like ours, is to review film, fragments of memories taking the form of film
in his case, and make spatially distraught images and sounds seamlessly cohere. Unfortunately,
the trauma in his life leads him to shortchange the hermeneutic process to an excessive degree:
he takes the unfinished, often contradictory and in-progress fragments of possible future murders
and enforces unjust closures. Family trauma is the origin of a work of mourning that, having left behind the private for
the public, eliminates ontological and hermeneutic play as a means of safeguarding the public
body. Spielberg’s film not only suggests that play is essential to our being, but that play,
uncertainty, and (hermeneutic and ontological) spatiality are necessary for a just society.
My argument, however, focuses on the manner in which trauma
is juxtaposed with birth in this post-9/11 film. Family trauma is cynically utilized to bolster the
state and its biopower, ignoring the “essence” of family as a figure for birth, as an ontological
and hermeneutic opening.